“From our 29,000 phantom bookings, we’ve received over several hundred reports of Grab soliciting our taxi drivers to attend their driver orientations. This is our single most compelling piece of evidence pointing to them as the culprit of the phantom bookings,” Ybañez told BusinessWorld.

“Grab’s phone calls occur a few minutes after a phantom booking and they contact the driver via the phone number they registered with Micab, which would have been difficult to obtain any other way.”

He added that their investigations revealed that the SIM numbers used to book the rides are sequential, which means that they were probably bought in batches and the bookings come from a single entity.

Grab Denies These Allegations

Brian Cu, country head of Grab Philippines / Image Credit: Grab

In response to these allegations, Brian Cu, country head of Grab Philippines said that they carried out internal investigations last week and they can now “confirm that Eddie Ybañez’s allegations are untrue and appears to have malicious intent”.

He also urged Ybañez to be “responsible in his speech and actions”; and if he continues to make further false allegations, Grab will not hesitate to take libel action.

We will transparently share the results of our investigation that confirms that the allegations are false. Grab did not do 15,000, or per Eddie Ybañez’s revised comments on 24 July, 29,000 “phantom bookings” on the MiCab platform. We did less than 15 completed bookings a day to benchmark industry allocation rates and service levels. Further to this, we categorically did not make any follow-up phone calls to the drivers.

Grab however, is unable to share details of their investigations due to legal issues, but promises to be transparent with their findings when the time is right.